today is a gift; that's why it's called the present

personal

Recently realized that after all this time, I still haven’t posted anything about my internship! It doesn’t feel like 2.5 months since I stepped into the office on the first day, but strangely it feels like forever since I last went to school (lol doesn’t make sense, I know).

Anyway, I’m interning at a startup called gametize. Every time I tell someone that, the next question is “oh cool, do you make games?” but no! It’s a tech and gamification consulting(?) company which basically has a mobile+web platform for creating and playing games; each game is made of individual tasks which are called ‘challenges’, like mcq quizzes and fixed-answer questions and upload-a-photo tasks. Most games on the ^ website are free but the company earns money through licensing the platform to other companies and customizing stuff for them.

My main internship project (with Vivek) is developing a web app to replace the current gametize.com website, cos it’s built with Java currently and is very complicated and slower. The new web app is also supposed to be more streamlined with the mobile apps in terms of both UI and how it gets data- through API calls like the mobile apps, instead of accessing the database and processing the data directly (which is why it’s complicated and slow).

We were deciding between react (js library) and angular (js framework) initially, and decided to go with react. Vivek and I used ionic for our sutd app previously, which uses angular, so it was interesting to see the differences between the 2. Angular, being a framework, is much more prescriptive and rigid, but using react means we have to make more decisions on how to do stuff. One article I read summed it up as “angular = putting js into html, while react = putting html into js” which is really apt haha.

When we started on the web app in week 2 we thought we could get it done in like 3 weeks, but we were so wrong LOL. We got most of the main functionality up within the first few weeks but there’s forever still lots of “small stuff” remaining. So we’re still working on it now, and somehow as we code we keep finding even more small stuff so our “to-do” board on trello is never empty D: sigh

Summary of the main things we’ve been doing:

(first 2 weeks) familiarize ourselves with the main gametize codebase, research on react, decide on using react

decide on file organization and app routing

make all the pages

styling + making the pages responsive

writing tests (mostly done by vivek while I was on holiday heh)

implement redux

navigation (sidebar + topbar)

We wanted to keep the app components as simple as possible so we wrote our own router instead of using react-router and refused to use bootstrap hahaha. I think it’s good cos we get to learn how things work rather than just plug in unnecessarily big modules!

The best part of internship is that my official working hours is 11am-7pm!! And actually nobody cares so if I wake up late I just go and leave later, or if I’m going out for dinner I start work earlier. This makes a lot of sense cos I don’t think I’ll be productive if I have to start work at like 9am, and the flexibility is v nice! The office is tiny (smaller than my house) and feels kinda cramped sometimes but overall it’s still great cos 1. we take off our shoes outside (also, work attire is tshirt and jeans) 2. there’s a pantry+snacks shelf and we get to go company-sponsored grocery shopping once in a while, and 3. there’s a “play room” with beanbags where we can chill anytime and play mario kart/ limpeh says/ other random games :D

Randomly woke up early today so I’m writing this in the morning before work!

Anyway as I said in my last post, I signed up for 21km for the The Performance Series Race 1 and woke up at 3am(!!) yesterday for the run. My parents sent me there and took photos/videos of me crossing the start line, then went home to continue sleeping hahahah. Met up with joe who was there super early, deposited my bag and queued for the toilet…. then it was time to start! Ok not really, the run officially started at 5am but we were in the third and last wave so we had to wait in the pen for quite a while. We finally started at 5am!

this is the race route

Joe and I had run most of the route last weekend (but starting from gardens, then run to ECP and back, without the stadium part; also cycled this stretch for night bike before too) so it was mostly a familiar route. The first 2km at tanjong rhu was quite bad though, cos the path was like a normal pavement kind of width so it was very narrow and you were basically stuck following the very slow pace unless you run on the grass beside it to over take people. I took it as a slow warm-up so it wasn’t too bad for me, but joe couldn’t take it and went ahead on the grass after the first 1km.

Weee school is over and I’m now in my first week of internship! Would’ve like to write this earlier when I had more feels but last week was just studying for and taking exams, then a v tiring long weekend then straight away started work yesterday.

Kinda lazy to write about other things that happened before the term ended. Actually there’s nothing much to say anyway, the last 2 weeks have been v free. It’s funny how other ppl are like “oh I can’t go out cos I got exams coming up in 2 weeks” but for us it’s like “ya sure I’m v free cos I have exams next week”. Oh ya ok part of why I was so free is cos week 13 was the final presentation and submission for ESC game, the presentations were spread out across the week but my group’s was on monday so after that we were pretty much done with it. Also this was quite a sucky project experience cos one of my groupmates was mia 90% of the time, and the rest weren’t very enthusiastic about it also so we just kinda did the minimum to meet the requirements. The app works decently but I don’t really feel proud of it cos we put so little effort :/ also feels kinda cheaty cos we just made our game multiplayer on 1 phone and didn’t have to do any networking (which is what most groups lost a lot of sleep over). Blehh

Wow wordpress changed the new post screen again?? And it now uses the apple font hmm I like how everything looks v clean but like a bit boring/ no character leh lol. At least this posting field still uses an interesting font (got curious and went to check, it’s called Merriweather).

Anyway I went to i light at marina bay last night, it was quite nice but tiring – we walked one whole round from esplanade to MBS and back to raffles place whew. Sadly I didn’t have my camera cos I went from school :( but I guess it doesn’t really matter cos I just used my phone and the quality was surprisingly good!

(wow much minimalist, there isn’t even a button for adding media anymore lol. seems like you have to drag and drop?)

Using a different layout for fun, click to view the whole photo with captions!

a dodecahedron!

cool patterns

just realised that these are hexagons but the first pic’s structure has pentagons for its sides??? confused

more hexagons! and oo there are some dodecahedrons and some structures-with-hexagon-and-square-sides, didn’t notice that when I was there :o

giant inflatable animals at art-zoo!! so cooll but sadly not free and wj wasn’t too keen so we didn’t go

sparkly helix bridge hahaha

not the sharpest photo but I always like taking the sg skyline!! this was from the 4th floor of the shoppes at marina bay, never knew you could go up there

I’m dyeing my hair tmr!!!! This actually came up cos I went shopping with some of the guys for benny’s bday present and I was complaining that they didn’t celebrate my bday (or rather sean brought up the fact that I was kind of salty about it lol). Then stanley came up with the idea of treating me to dye hair as a belated present and so… we went to check out the salons and book appointment! Exciting hehe hope it turns out nice x)

V amused by school this week – we learnt about communication between processes which was fun cos you can run different programs and make them talk to each other:

(the “husband” is the server which connects to multiple clients i.e. the “wives”. the husband can talk to multiple wives but each wife can only see her convo with the husband. This husband wife thing was in the code given to us LOL)

One of our hw problems is to make a chat room hahaha whatsapp for nerds xD

I was sick on wed and thurs, was v sian but I got to sleep a lot and do nothing heh. Ty vivek for accompanying me to see doctor ^^

Had lunch at sumiya today for jasmine’s bday, the charcoal grilled pork was gooddd

I recently realised that I’m already in junior year now! (basically year 3, cos this is my 5th studying term out of 8 in total)

Lessons have been…. uninspiring. This term is still all compulsory mods so I’m taking software construction (ie. java 2), computer system engineering (ie. comp structs 2) and probability & statistics. I’ve been skipping prob & stats quite often cos it’s faster to just read through the notes myself, ty joe and vivek for helping me mark attendance hehe yall r the best! Software constructs is very ‘high level’ as in we’re looking more at the big picture of software development (agile methodology, testing, design patterns) which is important to know I guess, but v sian to learn in class. Last week we had a talk by some people from Tata for one of our lessons and they talked about their workflow for a project, it’s super complicated man – everything must plan, get approval, test on many different levels, I can’t remember what else right now but ugh. Maybe next time when I have more experience doing bigger projects I’ll appreciate all these stages but for now I feel it’s v convoluted. I just want to do my programming!! Hahaha.

For hass I didn’t choose the maps mod fast enough :( so I’m in rice cultures with marvin weijun jiacheng and a bunch of other epd guys I know. Classes are quite boring cos the prof talks in a very dead way lol but having friends in class makes it more fun (esp marvin with all his nonsense). And we’re actually planting rice!

sowed the seeds on thurs!

Oh ya this is quite a while ago already but my uni friends got me a new bike for my birthday!! It’s a bit too tall for me LOL I can’t reach the floor on both sides at the same time but it’s v smooth and nice to cycle :DD Only cycled it out twice though, once to simei for impromptu dinner with nic and once to the mrt. Should cycle out for dinner more oftenn

my new bike :D

Anyway since school is relatively chill I’ve had time to go out/ meet people even on weekdays! My mondays are back to back lessons the whole day but tues and fri have 1 lesson each only.

This week I was especially free for some reason. Played badminton on mon plus went for my first frisbee training in a long time, on tues we went to bedok point sushi express for dinner and celebrated clement’s bday, wed marvin drove to simpang for prata!! then we came back and went around getting free food from the vday carnival. I ended up going around with joe cos the rest weren’t v interested. But it was fun playing the bouncy castle stuff! And getting free churros and eclairs hehe.

clement made the melted crayon art kinda thing for his gf, I wanted to see how it’s done and ended up helping him with it. kinda fail cos the colour is supposed to be dripping down instead of filling the entire canvas LOL. idk whether it’s because he used oil pastels instead of crayons.

The exploreSUTD app is now in the testing phase ie. one step closer to being done woohooo. Strange how most of the app was actually completed long ago but all the small tweaks and finalizing up everything is dragging on for so long. But I don’t think there will be much more to change/ add on except moving the info pages to the CMS, and anyway open house is coming soon so the app needs to be out by then!

Another thing I’ve been working on is a website for a SUTD business competition (making the website that has all the competition info, not to participate in it). Pretty happy with how it turned out cos I think it looks much better than the previous year’s one. Also I only spent a total of 5h? or probably less that that on it cos I used some template and basically only had to change the content. Interesting that it’s so easy to make a decent looking website but getting a professional custom website is so ex.